Back in the summer and autumn of 2006, long before Tom Allen began his campaign for the US Senate and I began my campaign for Congress, it became clear that George Bush and his allies in the telecommunications industry had no intention of willingly letting us know the extent to which they were violating the Fourth Amendment in their illegal spying operation.
So that October, I joined with 21 other Maine residents and the Maine Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit against Verizon to force them to disclose the extent of their complicity with the Administration’s unconstitutional activities.
Let’s be clear about something: telecom immunity is NOT just about protecting the companies that helped the Administration break the law. It’s about keeping the public in the dark about the extent of that lawbreaking. It’s not just about protecting Bush’s accomplices, but Bush himself.
As numerous bloggers, news analysts and experts have pointed out, allowing the –Police- Protect America Act to expire doesn’t put our country at any greater risk. Implying otherwise is lying, period. So when the President claims that the PAA is essential to protecting American lives, and then threatens to veto it unless it includes immunity for companies that broke the law at his behest, we have to ask ourselves what his true motive is.
Keeping the telecom firms out of court doesn’t just protect them from settlements—as a matter of fact, the lawsuit I joined in filing doesn’t even ask for monetary damages, but rather a court order preventing Verizon from participating in further warrantless spying. That’s not to say that the telecoms don’t owe us a full reckoning and potentially compensation to people whose rights were violated, but there’s another major factor at play.
Part of the process of suing the telecom companies is discovering just what they were promised or led to believe by the Administration. While Congress has been unconscionably slow in enforcing oversight of the Executive Branch and in uncovering the Bush Administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions, the legal process could potentially provide the people with another way of learning the truth about how our rights were taken from us. And that’s a thought that likely keeps White House lawyers up at night.
I applaud the House for refusing to give the telecoms a free pass for breaking the law, and I am grateful for the work of legislators like Senator Chris Dodd in making sure that our interests and our rights are protected from an administration run amok.
As someone who has spent decades working to fight poverty, I’m not usually in the habit of quoting Ronald Reagan. But following the Challenger disaster, he said something that I think the "Reagan Conservatives" now dominating the Republican Party and the administration should remember. He said, "We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute."
We deserve openness. We deserve answers. I’ve fought in Maine to get them, and I will fight in Washington for them.
State Senator Ethan Strimling
Candidate for Congress, ME-01